


In Brussels

by spaceboy



Category: Archie Sheridan & Gretchen Lowell Series - Chelsea Cain, Gretchen Lowell Series - Chelsea Cain
Genre: F/M, but there will be implied underage noncon in the backstory, i just consider all gretchen/archie sex to be dubcon, it's a rough backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:48:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 10,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28214223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceboy/pseuds/spaceboy
Summary: This is my version of what should happen in Book Seven, based on the two excerpts that have been released. Gretchen's death has been faked, and some years later at a conference in Brussels she reveals to Archie that she is still alive, and he has to figure out what actually happened to her.
Relationships: Gretchen Lowell/Archie Sheridan





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> (This chapter takes place during Book Six, on Halloween night, as Gretchen is driving them from Archie's apartment out to Jack's island in Lake Oswego.)

They stopped at a light down on Naito Parkway, and she turned to him, her arm snaking up his back to cup her hand around the nape of his neck. She leaned in to kiss him, and he knew he had to let her if he wanted to keep up the illusion that he was still under her thrall. The pills made it easier, the sensation of them humming along under his skin, telling him to let go, to give in, to them, to her. 

The kiss was startlingly soft, teasing, barely there, daring him to make the move to intensify it, but _that_ he had to resist. Give her just enough to keep her happy, but no more. No matter how good it would feel.

Maybe it would be all right to give her just a little more. But the light changed and she broke away before he could make that decision. She accelerated off of Naito and onto I-5 South, one hand on the wheel, one hand on his thigh. 

“When are you going to stop pretending?” she asked, her voice startlingly harsh after the gentle kiss. “Who do you think you’re helping by resisting? Debbie? Susan? _Henry?_ You’re only putting them in more danger.”

“ _Me,_ Sweetheart. I’m helping _me,_ and my soul if I have one.”

“Oh, Darling, you burned _that_ bridge a long time ago.”

He didn’t have an answer, and stared out the window instead, through the mist at the streetlights sliding by. It wasn’t until she parked the car near the lake of Lake Oswego that she spoke again, sitting still in the silence of the cooling engine. 

“Look at me.”

His obedience was automatic. There was no calculation this time; it was written into him, into his scars, to follow this order. It had been rule number one: She didn’t like to be ignored. His head snapped away from the window and his eyes locked to hers.

She smiled. She knew.

“This is your ultimatum,” she said softly, slowly, as if thinking it through as she were saying it -- but he didn’t believe that, not for a second. She always had everything planned ten steps ahead. “After tonight, I’m going to give you a year. I’ll stay out of town; I won’t get in your way. You can do what you want; I won’t hold it against you. Play house with your Pigeon for all I care. But in that time, you have to make a decision.” She reached out and ran her fingers down his jawline, and he could only shiver and hold still. “When I come back for you, will I take you away with me as my lover, or as my victim?” 

“You’re going to kill me either way,” he said, voice even, emotionless. It was just a fact.

“Yes. But I want you to be happy first. I want you to _let_ yourself be happy first.”

What he _wanted_ to say was a sarcastic one-liner: “And you think being with _you_ will make me happy?” But he found he couldn’t say it. Because it was true, being with her _would_ make him happy, and the thought of it, of running away with her, washed over him like a sneaker wave of bliss. Instead, he swallowed down the lump in his throat and said, “It’s time to get this over with.” And he got out of the car. 


	2. One Year Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry delivers some news, and Archie and Susan have very different ideas of how to react to it.

“She’s dead. Isn’t she?”

The three of them sat around the kitchen table in the house Archie and Susan had shared for the past year, as Henry delivered the news of the century.

Henry nodded, and waited for the fallout. Three years ago, when Gretchen was still in prison and he had tried to cut Archie off from seeing her, there had been shouting, pleading, breaking things. So as much as he wanted to celebrate the news, he had to be prepared to handle Archie’s potential meltdown first.

But Susan didn’t know that. She hadn’t been there for that tantrum three years ago, and she had an astonishing ability to misjudge a situation. 

A huge grin broke across her face, and a bizarre howling yelp of joy issued from her mouth. She clapped her hands. She threw her arms around Archie and smacked a kiss against his cheek, apparently not noticing that he was totally unresponsive, sitting stiffly and watching Henry closely as if trying to solve a puzzle. Then she shot up out of her seat and climbed up on the counter to pull down a bottle of champagne from a high shelf. “Who wants to pop the bottle?” she asked as she hopped down and turned back to them.

That was when she finally realized that everything was not all right. Neither Henry nor Archie had moved, smiled, or responded to her in anyway. They sat, and looked at each other, and that was all. Susan set the bottle on the table and bent over the back of Archie’s chair, arms slung around him, cheek pressed against his. “What’s the matter, honey? Ding dong, the witch is dead!”

Archie shrugged her roughly away. “Tell me what happened.” His voice was hoarser than usual, but steady and seemingly calm. “Are you _sure_? Is there a body?”

“She got pulled over by a local deputy just outside La Grande. Tail light out. She stopped, but he realized who she was. So she drove off, and he was. . .” Henry paused and shook his head. “He was new, and he was an idiot, and he tried to pit her, and her car spun off the road. The body’s with the Union County ME. It’s in bad shape, but they got fingerprints and dental records. It’s her.”

“I need to see it.”

“We can drive out there tomorrow.”

Susan’s feathers were ruffled by the rejection, but she quickly rationalized it when she heard his question. Of course, he wasn’t comfortable celebrating until he knew for sure. But he trusted Henry, and Henry seemed to have the whole story, so _now_ everything would be fine. She put her arms around him again.

Again, he pushed her away. 

“What’s your problem?” she demanded. 

He turned and looked at her for the first time since Henry had arrived. He didn’t look happy. He looked, just -- _blank_. Empty. The pause was much too long before he said, “Nothing. No problem. I just need some time to process this.” He turned back to Henry, and some understanding passed between them, something Susan was completely cut out of. She felt suddenly very cold. None of this made sense, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. She wanted to curl up in a hot bath until she was warm again and Archie would hold her. 

She jumped at the sound of chair legs scraping on the floor as Archie got up. He walked right past her to a coat closet near the door, took a box off the top shelf and unlocked it. Susan knew what was in that box. She didn’t like that box.

He returned to the table and set both guns down in front of Henry. “They’re empty,” he said. 

Henry checked anyway, avoiding Archie’s eyes as he asked, “Do you have any pills?”

“Not unless you want to confiscate my Prilosec. You don’t have to take my word for it. If there were any in the house you know Susan would have found them by now.” He turned and headed out of the room.

“Where are you going?” Henry demanded.

“To bed. Assuming I’m allowed to be alone,” he added. His voice was rougher, angrier, showing now that at least he was feeling _something_ , though Susan couldn’t understand _what._

“It’s fine,” said Henry wearily, and Archie disappeared down the hall, slamming the door to the bedroom like an angsty teenager. Susan jumped up to go after him, but Henry leaned across the table to grab her arm and shook his head. “Give him some space.”

“ _Why?_ And what are you doing with his _guns?”_

“Susan.” Henry sighed, shook his head, rubbed his eyes with his fists. As if it wasn’t enough to have to parent Archie through this kind of thing, now he also had to deal with Susan’s obstinate refusal to see how bad things could get. “Susan, I _know_ you’re not really that stupid. I’m sorry this isn’t the party you wanted to have, but it’s a little more complicated for him than ‘ding dong the witch is dead.’”

Susan was livid. Not because she didn’t know what he meant, but because she _did_ know what he meant and she didn’t _want_ to. “Okay, so let’s pretend for a minute that I _am_ really that stupid. Now explain to me why, after everything that bitch has done, why he would be so upset about this that you think he’s going to — what, go crazy and _shoot_ someone?”

“ _Himself,_ Susan! _”_ Henry snapped. “I’m afraid he’s going to shoot _himself,_ because for a very long time she was the only thing _stopping_ him from doing exactly that.”  
“But not _anymore!_ He has _me!_ And he’s _done_ the therapy and he’s _off_ the drugs and now she’s dead and we can _move on!_ ” Her voice was getting embarrassingly squeaky as she grew more frantic, her hair (electric blue this month) seemed to be getting more disheveled by the second, and she was pretty sure she was going to burst into tears at any moment.

“Yes. You’re right.” Henry sounded calmer now, speaking evenly and gently as if soothing a child, which of course made Susan more angry and more embarrassed. “And those are all good things; those are all the things that mean we’ll be able to get him through this, but it’s still going to take work. So what we need to do is keep him safe, and give him some space until he’s ready to talk to us.”

“Fine. Whatever.” She was going for cool and detached, but she could only manage verge-of-hysteria. “I guess you know best, so _you_ get to be his girlfriend for a while; _I’m_ going to take a bath.”

She got up and left the room as the tears started to stream down her cheeks and drip from her pointed chin onto the linoleum. Henry barely had time to sigh and put his head down on the table when she reappeared, silently stalked to the table, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and went out again.


	3. Stages of Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie leaves some unwise voicemails.

Archie sat on the edge of the bed, leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands clenched together so tightly they were white and shaking. His head drooped as if he were looking down at his hands, maybe as if he were praying, but his vision had gone unfocused and fuzzed over to nothing. He was locked in his head, focused on only one thing: 

He had to talk to her.

Because it wasn’t true. It  _ couldn’t _ be true. But he had to talk to her, so he could be sure. And he  _ could  _ talk to her -- he just had to wait until he could do it without Henry or Susan overhearing.

She always made sure he could reach her if he needed to. Of course, she would have burned the phone she was using last October. But when he was released from the hospital and went through his things, he found a scrap of paper slipped into the pocket of his jacket, with a new number on it. 

He waited there until he heard the tub drain an hour later, then undressed and got into bed, turned toward the wall. He stayed still as Susan came and went, getting ready for bed in her reluctant and haphazard way.

A muffled conversation came through the wall, and the sounds of rummaging in closets. They must be making up the couch so Henry could stay over. There was no point in all this fuss. Archie was perfectly safe. Because Gretchen  _ wasn’t _ dead. 

Susan came to bed, but she sat up late, the light of her laptop glowing through his eyelids. She was probably pretending she was writing, but the lack of clickety clacking keys told him she was probably getting sucked into news sites and social media instead, as usual. 

Finally, she closed the laptop and rolled over and put an arm around him, cuddling into him from behind. “I know you’re awake,” she said softly. “You never sleep that deeply, you’re always twitchy and mumbly.”

He didn’t say anything. 

“Whatever,” she huffed. She let him go and rolled over to the other side of the bed. Her breathing gradually slowed and evened and deepened. She was right about his shitty sleep quality, but  _ she _ slept like a rock, and there was no faking that. Archie counted a hundred of her breaths and then grabbed his phone off the bedside table and slipped out of bed and down the hall. To the right he could hear Henry snoring in the living room. 

He closed the bathroom door carefully, as quietly as he could, locked it, and sat down on the edge of the tub. The room still hung heavy with almost visible clouds of lavender scent and peppermint Dr. Bronner’s from Susan’s bath. 

He took a deep breath, dialed the phone, and held the breath as it rang. He flinched at the end of each ring, sure that she was about to pick up. His pulse quickened with the terror and excitement of knowing he would hear her voice soon. But the ringing continued. Finally an automated voice informed him that the party he was trying to reach was not available. 

_ Leave a message after the tone. _

“Gretchen,” he spoke softly and quickly into the phone, still worried about the other two hearing. “It’s me. I need to talk to you. Henry told me today that you’re supposed to be dead. Obviously you’re not dead, but I need to hear it from you, to be sure. I don’t care what game you’re playing; I won’t tell anyone; I won’t interfere. I just need to  _ know _ . Call me back. Please.”

He hung up and sat staring at the glow of the phone until it went dark. He was still vibrating with the tension of making the call, ears ringing, blood rushing. The few sentences of his message had been cycling through his head all night, and he wasn’t sure what to do now that he’d finally managed to send it. The only thing he  _ could _ do, really, was to wait for her to call back. Maybe he should try to sleep in the meantime. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, and he would just lie there in the dark, next to Susan, unable to turn off his mind. 

He wanted pills. Over the past year the craving had evened out to a vague constant  _ lack _ that wasn’t so different from all the other chronic pains and emptinesses he lived with from day to day, so that he had almost stopped thinking about it. Except on bad nights, and this, this was obviously the worst of the bad nights. 

The hardest part was it was true that he didn’t have any. Counter-intuitive though it was, it had always been easier to deal with the cravings when he could take the pills out and look at them, feel them in his palm, taste the residue they left on his fingers. Just being close to them could help. Now, without them, there was nothing he could do to ease the need.

To take his mind off the pills, he did the only other thing he wanted to do.

He hit redial.

He listened to each ring, still half expecting her to pick up, and jumped when a voice came on the line -- but of course it was only the generic recording again, telling him she wasn’t there. He didn’t know what he was going to say this time until he opened his mouth. 

_ Leave a message after the tone. _

“You can’t do this,” he growled into the empty line. “You can’t just  _ leave  _ me after everything you’ve done to me. Not when you said you were coming back for me. Not when you haven’t finished what you started. What the hell, Gretchen. Fuck you.”

He squeezed the red End Call icon and kept his grip on it long after the screen had gone dark, squeezing it tight enough that the screen might have cracked if Susan hadn’t finally introduced him to the concept of a phone case and screen protector. Only now that he had stopped talking did he realize that his voice had been steadily getting louder as he left the second message, and he waited, silent and shaking with anger, listening to the creaking of the house and the dripping of the rain outside, to find out if he had woken anybody. But there were no human sounds except Henry’s snoring, and Archie gradually relaxed. His grip on the phone loosened. The anger gradually ebbed away, leaving a cold void of confusion where it had been. 

He dialed again.

_ Leave a message after the tone. _

“Did I do something wrong? Is it because of Susan? I thought -- I thought you would be okay with it. You said I could do what I wanted this year. I thought it was just like with Rachel last year. I would have ended it when you came back.” He realized he hadn’t made the decision until this moment, but now as he said it he knew it was what he would have decided all along. “I would have chosen you. I thought that was what you wanted. Please, Sweetheart, just tell me what I did wrong. I’ll fix it; I’ll do whatever you want. I’m sorry. Just give me a chance.” He started choking up, but he swallowed it down and ended the call, and stared up at the mirror above the sink through a distorting sheen of unshed tears. He looked pale, tired, old. More grey hair, more lines on his face. No new scars, not since last Halloween, anyway. Maybe there wouldn’t be any more. Maybe this was it.

Maybe she was really gone. 

Maybe she hadn’t planned any of this. He had started to think of her as invincible, all-powerful. She had done a good job of pretending to be omnipotent, but in the end she was only human. She might be dead.

He might be alone. 

He dialed one more time. His voice was different this time, hollow and almost monotone, rasping from the years-old damage the drain cleaner had done to his esophagus. 

“I just need to know it’s not true. Please --” his voice broke off; he cleared his throat and rubbed his free hand across his face. “Please don’t leave me in the dark like this. I -- I still need you. I’ll always need you. Please just -- just don’t be dead, Sweetheart, okay?”

He hung up the phone. He was breathing better now. Shaky, and empty, like he had just finished crying, even though he had managed  _ not _ to cry, but still better. He had done all he could, and the pent-up energy washed off him in waves. He was tired. Maybe he could sleep. He got up and walked to the bathroom door, tiles cold under his feet. He opened the door.

And found himself face-to-face with Susan.

She was shivering, in pajama pants and a camisole, goosebumps standing out on her bare arms. Her face was ashen, her eyes were wide and red and puffy, her lips were quivering. “I drank all the champagne,” she said hollowly, “so I woke up cause I had to pee. . . .”

“How --” his voice cracked, he swallowed and cleared his throat and tried again. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough.” 

He thought she was going to leave it there, on that ominous and cliche note, but she didn’t.

She didn’t sound hysterical like she had earlier. Her voice was terrifyingly calm, almost expressionless.“I came in at the part where you said you were only dating me so you had something to stick your cock in while she wasn’t around. You know, the part where you compared me to that whore she bought you.” 

“That’s not -- ”

“Don’t bother. I’m going to Bliss’s.”

“Susan, it’s not -- ”

“It’s not  _ what, _ Archie?” she asked scoffing. She crossed her arms and leaned back on one hip. She was gradually reverting from her state of shock to something more like her usual self. “No, really, I  _ really _ would love to hear what explanation you have that you think will make this better. Go ahead, tell me.” 

She cocked her head sharply to the side and raised her eyebrows, chewing silently on her lip. 

Archie mumbled a string of filler sounds. He didn’t have an answer. The last couple of messages ran through his head. He had said things aloud just now that he hadn’t even allowed himself to admit to himself in the last year. He shouldn’t have said that much even to Gretchen, much less to  _ Susan _ . He fell silent. 

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

She turned around and stalked into the kitchen, slipped her feet into a pair of still-tied converse low tops, crushing the backs of the shoes instead of bothering to fit her feet all the way in, and grabbed her keys. 

“Susan, wait --” he said as he followed after her, but he still wouldn’t have known what to say if she  _ did _ wait, so it was a relief, really, when she slammed the door in his face. He listened to the slap of her sneakers on the wet pavement and the coughing of her stupid Saab starting up and heading away. Then he turned around, to find, of course, Henry standing bleary-eyed across from him. 

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Archie snapped instantly. “I’m going back to bed.”


	4. Fallout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For once in his life, Archie's actions have consequences.

He woke up to the sounds of Henry aggressively making breakfast, cupboards slamming and dishes crashing. The aggression was concerningly un-Henry like. Susan could passive-aggressively slam a door like a champ, Archie himself had been known to break phones when he didn’t like what the person on the other end had said. But Henry was a virtually unshakeable pillar of calm. Not that he didn’t get angry -- Archie had seen him angry on several occasions, mostly angry at Archie himself -- but he got angry in a self-contained, quiet smoldering kind of way. Not a broken dishware kind of way. 

But when he had gotten dressed and made his way to the kitchen, it was definitely Henry who crashed a loaded plate down on the table hard enough that the toast and half the eggs were jostled off. He pointed to the plate, growled “Eat,” and moved on to washing the dishes in the same manner. 

Archie wasn’t hungry, but he also wasn’t about to argue with this new and terrifying version of Henry. He sat, and picked at the food, getting down what he could, which wasn’t much since he was a walking plasma globe of anxiety who also didn’t take his Prilosec often enough. 

“Did you talk to Susan?” Archie chanced warily.

“No.”

“Okay. . . .” So  _ that _ wasn’t what Henry was mad about, which was a relief, but left Archie even more confused. “Are we still going to La Grande?”

“We have to go downtown first and talk to the Chief.” He didn’t turn away from the sink or show any inclination to elaborate, so Archie left him alone and puzzled in silence.

It wasn’t until they were on the way downtown that he figured it out. There must be new information about Gretchen. Something that meant it might not be her after all.  _ That _ would be enough to get to Henry this badly -- thinking they were rid of her and then having that taken away from him. That had to be it. They’d find out it was all a mistake, and whether or not she answered his messages he would at least  _ know _ . 

Henry held the office door open for Archie, ushering him in, then followed him in and shut the door behind them. The Chief sat behind a desk that seemed just a smidge too big for the room, like a parody of a domineering boss’s desk. Unfortunately, it wasn’t entirely inaccurate -- the new Chief matched it perfectly. 

“Have a seat,” he rumbled. 

Archie sat in one of the slightly-too-low chairs opposite the Chief. Henry stayed standing at the door just behind him, looming over the slightly-too-small space between the door and the desk, with Archie caught in between. He shot Henry a “why are you being a fucking weirdo” look, and Henry, instead of responding, stared stolidly ahead at a Far Side cartoon taped up behind the Chief’s desk.

Archie was getting the distinct impression that whatever this was, it was not going to be good for him. 

“Do you know why I asked you to come here?” the Chief asked, sounding just like any traffic cop making a stop. 

“Cause you want me to liase with Sanchez to plan the inter-department softball game?”

The Chief was not amused. Instead of saying anything, he turned to his computer and clicked on something. 

Archie’s own voice came out of the tinny speaker. 

“Gretchen. It’s me. I need to talk to you. Henry told me today that you’re supposed to be dead.”

Archie looked from the Chief to Henry. He didn’t understand. Well, he understood that he 

was in deep shit. What he didn’t understand was  _ how _ . “You tapped my phone?” he asked Henry. It could only have been Henry.

“I don’t care what game you’re playing,” said Archie’s voice on the recording. “I won’t tell anyone; I won’t interfere.” 

“ _ We have HER phone,”  _ the Chief thundered. “ _ It was recovered with the body and this morning, lo and behold, it has four new missed calls on it! And they were all sent from the personal number of our very own star detective.” _

Heavy silence blanketed the room. The recording had reached the end of the first message. A moment later the second began, the same voice but hoarser and more desperate.

“You can’t do this. You can’t just  _ leave  _ me after everything you’ve done to me -- ”

“You can turn that off now” said the real live Archie. “I know what it says, since I said it.”

“No, it stays on, because maybe hearing it out loud will force you to recognize even a tiny fraction of how egregiously unacceptable this is.”

The Chief kept talking, probably listing all the things that were bad about this, but Archie was barely listening. He wasn’t listening to the recording either. He was processing the most important detail: That they had the phone. 

They couldn’t have made a mistake, because the phone couldn’t have gotten there at random.

And if she were faking, she would have taken the phone with her or hidden it. 

It was really her.

She was really dead.

And the Chief was still lecturing him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Archie interrupted, frustrated that the focus here was on what he had done wrong and not how to move forward and solve it. “We’ll pull some strings and the Task Force can requisition the phone and nobody else has to know about it.”

“ _ First of all _ ” -- oh, thought Archie distantly, now I’m supposed to be very scared because he’s pointing at me definitively -- “I know  _ too well _ that that’s how things operated under Buddy, but Buddy is no longer with us, and it won’t fly with me.” 

_Since fucking when?_ Archie thought. Buddy had been dead for over a year and nothing had changed up till now \-- but he didn’t have a chance to say that, fortunately, as the Chief railed on.

“ And  _ second _ , even if covering it up  _ were _ something I would tolerate, it’s a little late for that now. My secretary has been fielding calls all morning from a reporter asking us to comment on why the head of the Beauty Killer Task Force is in personal communication  _ with the Beauty Killer. _ In addition to quoting directly from these messages, she also stated that she had ‘all the tea’ regarding how your Task Force has been operating since  _ the first time _ you returned from medical leave. _ ” _

“ _ God fucking dammit, Susan!” _ Archie burst out. At least that explained the Chief’s sudden attempt to claim he was cracking down on corruption. He had no choice this time; Susan would make sure of it.

“So here’s what I’m hoping we can arrange. It will look better for everyone if you issue an apology and resign, and check yourself back into that inpatient program you were at a while back. It will at least mitigate the damage. Do that, and we’ll arrange a really good severance package, we’ll set you up with enough so that you can -- ”

“So that I can disappear from the picture entirely and keep my mouth shut about anything  _ I _ might want to share with the public about what the last couple of years have been like here?”

“To be blunt, yes.”  
“And if I don’t want to do that?”

“Then the situation will be much less pleasant for you, Detective Sheridan.”

Archie rolled his eyes. He was done with this. “Fine.” He stood up abruptly and Henry moved toward him as if afraid he would have to hold him back from jumping the Chief. He didn’t, just took his badge out of his wallet and dropped it on the desk. “Henry has my gun. Get somebody to write my ‘apology,’ I’ll sign whatever you give me.” None of it mattered anymore; there was no point arguing about it. “Can I go now?” he asked peremptorily, turning toward Henry, who was still standing just inside the door, giving the distinct impression that he was there less for moral support and more as a sort of bouncer in case Archie turned out to be extra crazy. The impression was confirmed when Henry glanced toward the Chief for an affirmative before he opened the door and followed Archie out.


	5. Transition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is literally just the chapter that gets us through the time skip, sorry, it's not good but it's necessary.

Archie didn’t intend to follow through on the chief’s plan. He intended to go home and wait until Henry left him alone before using his personal gun to blow his brains out. Or if Henry wouldn’t give the gun back, to chug a bottle of drain cleaner. That was more poetic, anyway. That was how he  _ should _ have died in the first place, if she had only killed him with it when she said she was going to.

But Henry didn’t leave him alone. They got back in the car together, and within a couple of blocks Archie had realized that they were heading the wrong direction. They were heading to Providence. 

“I can’t go straight there,” he said woodenly, still looking out the window at the grey sidewalks against grey buildings against grey sky. “I need to get some things.”

“Like what? Your sanity?”

“Long gone,” he mumbled. He thought of flinging the door open and tumbling out onto the pavement; maybe he could get himself hit by the car behind them. If he waited a couple of minutes they’d be on one of the bridges, and depending on which one Henry picked, it might be worth trying to get out and jump off of it. But there were a lot of “ifs” involved in that plan. 

And honestly, as he told the intake nurse in the psych ward a few minutes later, at this point the thought of trying to kill himself just sounded too exhausting to bother with. 

* * *

As the Chief had hoped, by the time Archie got out of the psych ward, the scandal had blown over at least enough that there were no reporters hounding the doors as he walked out of the hospital. Archie hadn’t wanted to leave, just as he hadn’t wanted to leave the first time he was there. He felt the same way he had back then -- that rehab actually would have been the perfect environment for him, if only they had let him have his Vicodin. But they wouldn’t let him stay forever, and eventually he had to admit that he no longer felt a driving urge to jump off the Steel Bridge -- which was conveniently both his favorite and the closest. 

He didn’t feel a driving urge for anything anymore, really. The pain had dulled, but nothing had grown to replace it. 

Susan was long gone. She was dating Leo again, he heard, and he felt nothing one way or the other about it, except a mild surprise that Leo was willing to try again after how badly she had treated him the first time. The house near Hawthorne with the purple door had been let out to somebody new. He stayed with Henry for a week, but it was all too obvious that he didn’t belong in Henry’s way anymore, not now that Claire and the baby were there too, not now that Archie had proven once and for all that all of the help they had tried to give him meant nothing to him. Nobody said anything, but they didn’t have to. By the end of the week he had found himself an AirBnB on the coast near Depoe Bay. He was supposed to stay there a couple of weeks, to think things through, to pick a direction. 

He stayed for five years.


	6. Five Years Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie tries a new drug and has a conversation with a dead woman.

He was sitting on the back porch, watching the water. Watching nothing, really. He called it whale watching. What it was, really, was just sitting, and smoking weed, and seeing nothing through the mist and spray. Sometimes he fell asleep. Sometimes he thought about her. Sometimes he just tried not to exist, not to think of anything at all. He was getting pretty good at that. 

Through the smell of salt and brine, there was something else. Flowery, dark, cloying, the scent that always flitted out of his memory whenever he was off his guard. He ignored it, as he always did. But it grew stronger. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wicker of the chair, and let himself sink into the memory-scent of lilacs. 

He felt her hand, soft and cool on his cheek and automatically leaned his face into it.

“Did you miss me, darling?” she said, bent close to his ear, her breath fluttering his hair.

“All the time,” he murmured. 

She laughed. “You don’t think I’m real, do you?”

“Of course you’re not real. You’re dead. But I think about you every minute I’m awake, and I dream about you every minute I’m asleep. I’ve just finally smoked enough weed to hallucinate you, too. But I’m glad you’re here, even though you’re not real.”

“I guess that’s flattering, in a way.” He felt her move around to the front of the chair, and her weight settle onto him, legs draped across his lap. She cupped his face in both hands and kissed him gently. He kept his eyes closed. He’d read that hallucinations were usually auditory  _ or _ visual, but rarely both. He didn’t know  _ touch _ figured into that, because he definitely  _ felt _ her weight on him, her lips on his. But he knew he didn’t want to see the empty space in front of him, the darkening overcast sky over the blank ocean, so he kept his eyes closed. “A cop smoking marijuana, though, Archie? Tsk tsk.”

“You’ve been out of the loop for a while, Sweetheart. Pot isn’t illegal anymore, and I’m not a cop anymore.”

“Oh, what happened? Finally see the error of your ways?”

Archie laughed harshly. “Please. No, they fired me. Something to do with how I wasn’t supposed to be in contact with a known serial killer at large.”

She gave a low whistle. “I didn’t think they’d ever grow the balls to fire you. Good for them.”

“Hey.”

“Well, they weren’t wrong.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“What do you do now? Just languish here and get high?”

“Sometimes. Other times I write papers. They invite me to speak at conferences. I’m going to Brussels in two weeks.”

“Papers about what?”

“About you, mostly. And people like you.”

“There’s nobody like me, Darling.”

“I know.”

“If I had come back, what was your decision?”

“My decision? Oh. . . . You must be the only one in the state who hasn’t heard the phone calls, huh, Sweetheart?”

“Being dead has its disadvantages.”

“My decision was I’m in love with you.”

“Good boy. I’ll see you again soon.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I have to.”

“Please don’t leave me.” He clutched blindly for her hand, and she caught his, twined her fingers through his and squeezed for just a moment.

“I have to. I’m sorry, Darling. But wait for me. Look for me while you’re in Brussells. I’ll meet you there, I promise.”

“Please, Sweetheart. . . .”

But she was gone. First her voice, then her touch, then her memory.

When he thought of it later, it came back to him as nothing more than a pleasant side effect of too much weed. 


	7. The Presentation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A creepy grad student helps Archie give his presentation in Brussels.

In Brussells, the presentation went fine, right up until it didn’t. 

Public speaking didn’t scare Archie. He had spent ten years getting up in front of flashing lights and hounding reporters to give press conferences about his team’s ongoing failure to do the one thing it existed to do -- catch the Beauty Killer. After that, speaking to a dimly lit audience of two hundred respectfully silent academics was nothing. 

Even the fact that they all  _ knew _ who and what he was, didn't scare him. He had done this before: spoken to rooms packed full of people who were there just to see him, just because he was "The Last Victim.” He was here to be gawked at, he understood that. And he wanted to be mad about it -- none of them understood, could ever understand, the horror of the reality of it -- but he wasn't, not really. He was, in a way he could never admit, pleased with the spotlight. It made him feel more real, acknowledged, validated. Sometimes he wasn't sure any of it had been real, but when a room full of people listened without contradicting what he said -- that made it true, solid, and almost manageable.

The problem, the thing that worried him, was not the audience. It was  _ himself _ .

Gretchen was always there, inside him. Her voice was always in his head. And in a crowd like this, when he was there specifically because of her, it was impossible for him not to see her in every strand of blond hair, in every flash of a red dress. And there were sometimes people in these particuar crowds who _wanted_ to look like her, wanted him to see her in them. 

This time, there was one girl in particular. A grad student who came up to him earlier in the day, in a red dress with a black belt, blonde hair, holding a complimentary cup of coffee out to him. "You looked like you needed it," she said, and he couldn't deny that. So he accepted it, and couldn't look away from her. "My name's Megan, and I already know who _you_ are," she said, "and I know what you're thinking. It's not intentional, but I can't say I mind it, if it gets you to look at me  _ that _ way _."  _ She smiled, and he realized this was flirting, and also that it was extremely inappropriate flirting, and he thanked her for the coffee and mumbled an excuse and became suddenly very interested in a presentation on forensic entymology the other side of the building.

He didn't want to admit it, but she had rattled him, and when he got onstage and saw her seated in the first row, looking enraptured up at him, it rattled him all over again. But still, he took a deep breath, he looked away from her at the darkness at the back of the theater, and then glanced at his papers and began to speak, everything he had written down that he had said a dozen times in front of people and a hundred times practicign for the whales out back at his AirBnB. 

It went fine, right up until it didn't.

Right up until he saw  _ her _ , in the back of the room, standing in the square of light cast by the open doorway.

She wasn't in red, that was the first thing he noticed. Not in red, but in a black suit, her gold hair a bright contrast falling over it. Her face wouldn’t quite come into focus from all the way up here, and he squinted to try to see, it looked different somehow, was something  _ wrong? _

\-- that was when he realized he had stopped talking, realized he was shaking, realized he had knocked his papers off the stand. He stooped to gather them up, shoved them back onto the podium at random, and when he looked up again at the back of the auditorium -- she was gone.

She had never been there, of course. He knew that was the correct answer. Either it had been some blonde professor who had gone into the wrong room, or it had been nobody at all, had been his own mind conjuring up the image he most wanted to see.

People were murmuring amongst themselves now, looking up at him, there was some tittering but mostly only concerned looks that hurt even more, and so he cleared his throat and tried to continue, but his broken voice wouldn't work, and his pages were out of order, and he coughed and rubbed his face with his hands and felt heat flash through him, and he couldn't do this anymore, couldn't be here in front of everyone, and he turned, and left his pages there, and left the stage. He made it just barely backstage and sank down onto the floor, back against a wall, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, trying to force himself to breathe.

He hadn't taken a Xanax in years. After the first couple of years, the panic attacks had stopped bothering him -- they only happened anymore when he was, in fact, in mortal peril, and at that point they were less of a disorder and more of a survival plan. But now, all of a sudden, this was a panic attack in full swing and he wished desperately that he had bothered to renew that perscription.

Instead, what he got, was the grad student. Megan, the same one he had run away from earlier, the same one who had been sitting in the front row, was suddenly in front of him, pulling his hands away from his face, threading her warm fingers into his. "It's okay," she was saying, and stroking his hair, pressing a hand against his cheek. "You're okay, it's just us, she can't get you here." It was the wrong thing to say, of course. The panic wasn't that Gretchen would be there. The panic was because she  _ wasn't _ there, because even the version of her that his brain had whipped up and placed in the room wasn't there anymore, because she would never be there again.

But the next thing Megan said was,

"Look at me, Darling."

His dark sad eyes opened and he was looking straight into her sparkling blue ones, and they were the same. Of course they weren't really the same; he knew if he looked closer or longer he would start to see the difference but it didn't matter, he didn't have to, he only had to look at her and listen to her and believe her for just a moment. 

"Say it again," he murmured.

"Look at me, Darling," she repeated, though he hadn't looked away. "That helps, huh?"

He nodded slowly. His breathing was returning to normal. His hand was pressed into hers, their fingers threaded deeply together, the way he had always held Gretchen's hand.

"I thought it might. Brains work in funny ways. It's only been a couple of minutes, do you think you can finish the presentation? Nobody will think anything of it, you just needed to take a minute. Totally fair. Half the room is psychologists, anyway."

He nodded. "Yeah. Give me just another minute."

An aide was hovering over them. Megan looked up at her and smiled and shook her head. "Just give us another sec, he'll be okay. And water, can he get some water?"

A moment later, there was an open water bottle in his free hand. "Drink, Darling," she told him as she helped steady his shaking hand and raise the bottle to his lips. He obeyed, and the ability to just do what she said and look at her face and listen to her call him that calmed him more than the water did. "Thank you," he said after a moment. "Can I go, now?" He closed his eyes and shook his head. As nice as this was, it was weird and wrong to let himself think he could have this. "I mean, I think I can go now."

"You can go now, Darling," she said, and even though he told himself that was just affirmation, he knew he wanted it to be permission. She helped him to his feet, ran her fingers through his hair to straighten it, nodded approval, and sent him out onstage.

"Sorry about that," he said to the assembly. The aide had already gathered up his papers and set them back in order on the stand, so that he could start right where he left off. "I'll try not to go overtime, but I hear Dr. Santos has canceled on us so the room is empty next session if anyone wants to stick around for a few more gory details." He began to read, and he kept his eyes down this time -- it wasn't the best speaking strategy, but it was a better one than looking up and risking another breakdown.

To Archie’s surprise, when he had finished and left the stage, Megan was there still, waiting in the wings. "I told the stage manager I was your girlfriend," she explained in a whisper as she took his hand and walked him out into the hall. "You don't  _ have _ a girlfriend, do you?" she asked, looking suddenly worried as if this had just occurred to her. "I wouldn't want to be stepping on anybody's toes, I just wanted a way to make sure you were all right afterward."

"It's fine," he said. "A little weird, but no, you're not stepping on any toes. I'm not exactly 'boyfriend' material, as you might have noticed."

She shrugged. "Everybody's  _ somebody's _ boyfriend material. You just haven't found the right girlfriend material."

He sighed and reluctantly disentangled his hand from hers. They had reached the hall, with its milling crowds and long tables of snacks and coffee. "Look, I appreciate what you did for me back there," he said, "but I've done this rodeo a few times now. I know what you're looking for, and I'm not interested in being part of your. . . I don't know, what is it? A fetish? An achievement? Both?"

He expected her to deny it. They usually did. Flipped their bleached-blond hair and widened their colored-contact blue eyes and swore up and down they had no idea what he was talking about, or even got angry and accused him of paranoia, as if they could make him so ashamed of being wrong that he'd screw them to apologize. As if the fact that he was paranoid was something new to him. He knew he was paranoid, and he knew he was right anyway.

But this time she didn't. Instead she said simply, "Why not?"

"Why not what?"

"Why aren't you interested in being part of it? You could be having a much better time than you are, you know. Nobody's  _ making  _ you live out your days in penitent celibacy. I've got a pretty good idea what you like, and I'm into it. Yeah, I'm into it partly because I find your history pretty sexy, but so what? Why does that mean we shouldn't be allowed to have fun?"

"You understand that  _ people died _ , right? A  _ lot _ of people."

"Uh huh. And rumor has it that didn't stop you doing it with  _ her _ . Why should it stop you now?  _ I _ didn't kill anybody."

He thought about it. The fact was, there were several answers, but none of them were ones he wanted to discuss with a complete stranger, no matter how creepily well she had read up on him. "I appreciate that you're straightforward about it. But the answer is no."

She nodded, accepting the rejection if not the reasoning.

"If you want anything more professional, though," he said, "you're welcome to ask me for an interview or a peer review or something." He regretted it immediately, but her face had already lit up and she was already saying yes and oh god he had just agreed to give an interview to a woman he knew for goddamn sure wanted to fuck him in the creepiest way possible. But it was much too late to take it back and before he knew it she had his number and had said she would text him to set up a time before the conference ended, and then she had hugged him again, in more of a jubilant schoolgirl manner than the smoldering temptress she had been going for initially, and bounced off into the crowd.

_ Jesus Christ _ , thought Archie.  _ Some day. _

Time to find himself a drink.


	8. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's not dead?

He was well and truly drunk when the knock came at the door. Alcohol wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was pills. He wanted them badly enough that he had briefly considered faking, or even creating, an injury to see what he could get out of the socialized medical system, but there were too many steps involved in figuring that out, and the tiny hotel room liquor bottles required only one step. So he settled for getting drunk. 

He considered ignoring the knock at the door. Who the hell would it be, anyway? If it was housekeeping, they would have barged in by now. The only other thing he could think of was that somebody  _ else _ had partaken of even more of the drinks at the conference than he had and was trying to get through the wrong door, in which case they would figure it out soon and go away.

But the knock came again, sharper this time, and he hoisted himself off the bed to go see who it was and make them go away.

He opened the door.

It was her.

Just standing there. As if it were nothing. Holding a bottle of wine as if she were showing up for a dinner party. In the perfectly normal hotel hallway, surrounded by the scent of too much chlorine, under the lights that were somehow too dim to be helpful but not soft enough to be flattering. Not that it mattered. She didn’t need to be flattered. She was always beautiful.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked, as if this was the most reasonable thing in the world.

“Come in,” he said dumbly, and stepped aside for her to come past him into the room. She came in, she closed the door behind her, and she pushed him roughly up against the wall.

“You want me,” she whispered in his ear, breath hot across its inner labyrinths.

“Yes,” he moaned, all at once everything too much to bear. “Please.” He would beg, he would barter, he would do whatever she asked, just to be inside her, just to be with her, any way she allowed. 

“Good boy,” she whispered in his ear, and that was when he knew it hadn’t been a weed-induced hallucination, or a dream, but that she had been there that day at the beach house.

She grabbed him by the hair, fingers curled tight to the roots, and yanked, till she had him out of the small foyer and into the room proper, and threw him onto the bed. He was already trying, as he fell, to pull his clothes off, but a moment later she was on top of him and the last few buttons of his shirt popped as she yanked it apart to see what lay underneath.

“Beautiful,” she sighed, as she straddled him and sat back, heavy on his hips, to look at the scars across his abdomen. She ran a finger along his collarbone. “These ones need some work,” she said, tracing the crescent moon scars that lay along it. “And these, she added, running her fingers down to the hashmarks on his hip. But he couldn’t pay attention; all he knew was that she was touching him. That she was talking to him, and about him. “You’ll let me fix them, won’t you?” she asked innocently.

“Of course,” he murmured before he really knew what he was saying. Of course he said yes. How could he deny her anything now, now that she was alive?

After that, the night went by in flashes, moments disconnected from each other by blackouts, the product of too much alcohol and pain and bliss.

Her teeth clamped down where his neck met his shoulder, and he gasped with long, long overdue fulfillment. "More," he gasped, "more pain. Please, I need -- I need to feel you, I need to know it's you, please --"

She bit down harder and dragged her nails down his back, not in the sexy vanilla way Alanis Morisette was talking about but slow and deep, pulling up the skin as she went, probably drawing blood. His breath was coming fast and uneven, hitching as if by breathing less he could make the pain stop -- that was one way to make the pain stop, he supposed, but he didn't want it to stop, he didn't want to die, not anymore, he had to be alive to feel her, to be with her. His hands grabbed wildly at her, only half in control, holding onto every part of her he coud reach, clawing into her as deeply as she was into him, but not to scratch, only to cling, to hold on, to keep her.

"Slow down, darling," she said, letting up on his neck to whisper against the already-bruising bite mark, pressing her hips against his hard cock through his pants, "we're just warming up."

Nothing, he thought as she pulled out the scalpel, no groupie, nobody, nothing, could ever compare, could ever be even near her league. It would never be like this with anyone else because he could never give himself over so completely to anyone else, never let anyone else cut into his flesh knowing, knowing, that she would kill him in the end, and that he would beg her to do it, and that until that moment the best thing he could hope for was the knowledge that she wouldn't stop, that she would do anything she wanted with him, that he belonged to her completely. Anything the groupies could offer was pretend. This, this was the truth.

She took him into the shower, after the first cuts, after the first time they'd had each other. Her face was inches from his, startling in its color and detail and beauty as the water ran down it. No matter how long he dwelt on her memory and her photos, they never live up to the real thing. But she looked different, as well. Older, worn, with thin lines around her eyes and mouth, and a long, thin scar across one cheek, with a spattering of small raised marks spreading out across her face from it. That must have been what he had seen in the auditorium, what he thought was different about her. He had never imagined her older, or scarred, or changed in any way from how he had known her. Somehow that touch of humanity made her more beautiful to him.

“I don’t understand,” he said. "What happened?"

“They kept me from you. They locked me up. I can't tell you any more, not yet. But you'll figure it out soon, very soon. I was so afraid that I'd lose you, that you'd kill yourself without me. But they told me you were still alive, and I believed them, I had to, because I needed you as much as you needed me. You kept me alive, and it took a long time, but I always knew I would get out, and when I did, I would come for you.” She leaned her forhead against his and he held onto her, not with nails this time, not in possession, just, for one moment, in love.

Afterward, they lay on the bed and held each other. He was bruised and bleeding, and she was quiet, thoughtfully running her fingers through his hair. It worried him.

“Please don’t leave me again. I can’t live without you again.”

She was quiet for too long, long enough that he knew she was going to leave. “Gretchen, please,” he begged, “take me with you. I don’t want any of this. I only want you. I don’t care if you kill me right away, or if you torture me for years, or if you’ve changed your mind --” he almost lost it at this, cracked a smile and an almost-chuckle -- “and decided not to kill me at all. Do anything you want with me but please, please don’t leave me here.”

“I’m sorry, Darling,” she whispered, her voice nearly breaking, a quality he didn’t expect in anyone’s voice but his own, “but I promise I’ll come back for you. It won’t be long this time.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be long  _ last _ time.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But it won’t be like that this time. I need to leave to help you understand. All right?”

“Please, no, I can’t. I can’t do it, I need you. I can understand well enough if you take me with you, can’t I?”

“I’m sorry, Darling,” she said again, “but one more test. One more. And then it will all be over, and you’ll be with me. You'll be mine."

"I've always been yours."

"Yes." She smiled in lazy contentment, looking remarkably like a lion with her golden mane of hair and her easy confidence. "You've always been mine. But you haven't always known it, and you still don't know everything. Remember, in the basement you told me, that you felt as if every new thing you learned about me meant you belonged to me a little bit more. Well, I want you to know everything, so you can belong to me entirely. I want you to be the only one left alive who knows the whole story. But you know what they say about writing, you're supposed to  _ show _ , not  _ tell _ . So I'm going to show you."


	9. The Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie's actions continue to have consequences.... albeit not the ones you might have expected.

He woke up hungover and in pain, but what else was new? He stayed still, kept his eyes closed, as last night came back to him in scraps and filaments. She was alive. She had been here. He could still smell her. They had fucked every way you could imagine in every part of the hotel room. She had cut him, re-opened the scars on his clavicle and the ones on his hip. And she had gone. He didn't remember he leaving, but he knew she had said she was going to. He remembered pleading with her to stay, and her refusal. He must have passed out before she left.

He opened his eyes. The light was too bright, both for his hangover and for the time of day that he  _ should _ have gotten up, but that didn't matter too much. He had given his presentation; that was all he really needed to do. From here on out, he was free to roam the conference or the city on his own, whatever he chose. Not that he wanted to do any of that now. His only goal now was to find her again.

He rolled onto his side -- and she was there. She was still there, turned away from him toward the window, her bare shoulders golden as her hair in the late-morning light.

"Oh, thank god," he sighed. "You stayed."

"Hm?" she said, and rolled over to face him. "Why wouldn't I stay?"

It wasn't Gretchen.

It was Megan.

"What the fuck," said Archie.

"Oh, don't like  _ that _ good morning very much. I liked 'oh thank god you stayed' a lot better, can we got back to that one?"

"Nope. We're gonna stick with 'what the fuck' till you explain to me what, exactly, the fuck."

"What the fuck about  _ what? _ "

" _ First  _ of all, when did you  _ get _ here, and second of all  _ why _ ?"

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Maybe the  _ oh _ wasn't really that drawn out, but it sure felt like it to Archie's spinning head. "Oh, Darling, I'm sorry, you were really drunk, I just -- I didn't realize you were  _ that _ drunk. I, uh, I mean --" her cheeks went charmingly pink -- "I know it wasn't  _ totally _ above board but I came by your room to say good night and, you know, offer one more time, and you took me up on it. If I'd known you were too drunk to  _ remember _ I would have said no, I hope you're not too mad about it, I promise you had a really good time. . . ."

Archie glanced down at his cut-up chest and laughed. "A really good time, huh?"

"I mean, sure, we got a little rough, isn't that how you like it?" She gave him a teasing smile and put out a hand to touch one of the new cuts, but he knocked the hand away.

"This isn't 'a little rough.' This is -- I don't care how drunk I was, I would never have let anyone do this. Not because it's too  _ rough _ , because these are -- " his voice caught, and he choked out the last words around a lump in his throat suspiciously like he was about to cry -- " _ her _ marks."

"Oh, Darling, but that's why we did it, you told me they were fading and you didn't want them to go away, so we just touched them up. They're still hers, Darling, I promise -- "

" _ Stop calling me that,"  _ he snapped. He got up abruptly and went looking for clothes, pulling them on passive-aggressively. "You've got a nice set of answers all lined up, did she coach you on those or did you come up with them on your own?"

"What are you talking about?" Megan joined him in the hunt for clothes, leading to an awkward moment when she reached for a bra that was tucked half underneath his shirt and they had to angrily and half-nakedly stare each other down before she ducked under his arm, grabbed the bra, and moved to put the bed between them as if for protection.

"Don't play dumb, there's no point. I've been through this before, she put you up to this -- she probably didn't even have to  _ pay _ you since you're so  _ into _ the serial killer thing. You should have played your cards better, she paid the last girl an  _ awful  _ lot to fuck me."

"You -- you think -- you're fucking crazy, you think  _ Gretchen Lowell sent me to fuck you?" _

"No, I think Gretchen Lowell sent you to  _ pretend _ that you had fucked me."

" _ What?" _

"Gretchen was here last night. You're here this morning.  _ Ergo _ , Gretchen had you come in to replace her when she left so that you could pretend it was you all along."

Her eyes went wide with infuriated disbelief. " _ Or, get this, OR, I _ was here last night,  _ and _ I was here this morning, but  _ you _ were too fucking drunk last night to understand that just because you were  _ calling _ me Gretchen doesn't mean I was  _ actually Gretchen Fucking Lowell who is actually extremely fucking dead." _

"No." He shook his head. He sank down on the bed and put his head his hands. "No, that's not -- that's not possible." Was it?

"You're fucking crazy,  _ Darling _ ."

"Yeah, well," he said weakly, all the fight gone out of him with the sudden introduction of doubt, "Me being crazy is kind of an open secret, so maybe you should have thought that one through  _ before _ you decided to fuck me for the cred."

"Maybe fucking so," she said, voice shaking, tears welling in her big blue eyes. She had managed to get all of her clothes on, in more or less the right order, so she grabbed her purse off the desk and headed for the door. "Any other dead serial killers you want to accuse me of working for before I leave? Bundy, maybe?"

"No, I think we've covered it," Archie said blankly, not looking at her but vaguely out the window at the foreign city outside. "Have a nice weekend. You still want that interview later?"

"Think I'll pass,  _ thanks _ ," she said, "I think I've got  _ plenty _ to write about now." And she slammed the door behind her. 


End file.
